Mockery of an Angel
by ncfan
Summary: The paper woman bleeds ink instead of blood, her heart no longer beating except to feel pain. Konan character study, Nagato x Konan.


The lyrics are from Savage Garden's _Gunning down Romance_. Brilliant song, don't own it, wish I did.

Disclaimer: I don't own Naruto.

.x.X.x.

_Love and other moments are just chemical reactions in your brain  
In your brain  
And feelings of aggression are the absence of the love drug in your veins  
In your veins  
Love come quickly  
'Cause I feel my self-esteem is caving in  
It's on the brink  
Love come quickly  
'Cause I don't think I can keep this monster in  
It's in my skin_

_I'm gunning down romance  
It never did a thing for me  
But heartache and misery  
Ain't nothing but a tragedy_

.x.X.x.

Rain comes falling out of a deep black night sky, fast and cold. The tower is silent as a tomb, dark and quiet, water beading against the windows.

Konan wanders the darkened halls, cloak hem sweeping the chilly linoleum floor with a whispering 'swish'. All the while, she is pursued by the phantom sound of Nagato's ragged breathing.

Konan wonders if it is normal to feel the way she does. To not feel her heart trembling, fluttering, every time she hears him cough. And to not feel any other reaction, for her limbs to be deadened and her eyes to remain cold. Now she has to struggle to dredge up emotion enough to worry, even though her brain is telling her she should.

Amegakure seems so different at night. When the lights go out, the city may as well be a city of the dead. And Konan looks, and thinks that it is appropriate for her city to be a dead thing, embers of light that appear during the day only being an involuntary reaction still carried out after death.

She is aware of, within herself, a dissonance between memories and sensation and feeling. It's like they're all working on different levels of her mind and sending off impulses that never reach each other. Konan looks back on her life and wonders where her emotions have gone.

Once upon a time, she was happy. Konan barely remembers what "happy" is, but she knows she was once. She was happy when Yahiko was alive and Nagato was with her, truly with her. Konan was happy even through adversity because they were her friends, her entire life. Now, Yahiko is dead but still walking, skin as cold and hard as marble, his eyes not his own, his every stolen breath a reminder of what Konan has lost, and Nagato is absorbed in his schemes.

Once upon a time, Nagato and Konan would send looks at each other, yearn for a touch, a look. They would smile at each other often and commiserate when they were reminded of their losses and when Yahiko was at his most reckless. They would sympathize with each other's pain, work to calm down Yahiko and dissuade him from his more harebrained schemes, share thoughts and emotions in the comforting darkness.

Now, it is different. Nagato has changed. He has been almost completely subsumed by Pein, losing himself to that soulless persona. Pein is powerful and terrifying, a misguided, well-intentioned creature of darkness, wanting only to cover the world in peace but attempting to achieve that goal through massive bloodletting, and he can never be to Konan what Nagato was. She still holds his ear, for Pein respects Konan and her wisdom as much as Nagato did, but when Konan looks into his many-layered eyes she knows that his heart no longer knows her.

The only time when Nagato ever seems to resurface is when he is at his most vulnerable, his most pitiable. Nagato struggles into life, unable to walk or even rise, using all of his strength to reach out to her with one hand, his eyes imploring, and for a moment he seems to remember that there was a time when Konan was the center of his whole world, remembering the awkward teenage days of burning cheeks and flushing, stolen glances. His hand stretches out towards her, and Konan takes the cold, fleshless fingers in her own, feeling no blood pumping beneath his flesh. Nagato's bones are so fragile and so prominent that if she were to squeeze a little harder, they would break in her hands.

Konan once had dreams of happiness. As a little girl she imagined love and long life. As a young woman, those dreams became centered around one person and she threw herself into those dreams far too much for her heart's safety.

But Konan has changed. Nagato wasn't all she dreamed he would be, too broken and too scarred, too fervent and too radical to notice her or have time for pursuits of love or passion. And Konan became broken too. She no longer knows feelings of passion and love, of joy and simple pleasure. She no longer places any weight on simple human faith, no longer truly living at all. Konan is a paper woman, made of origami paper intricately folded without any passion. Her wings shoddily imitate the angel's style, when her numb being is bogged down in sin. Cold, coagulating ink flows in her veins instead of blood, her eyes regard the world coldly, and her heart doesn't beat without great impetus.

They have all changed. Yahiko is dead, Konan is made of paper, and Nagato is Pein.

Even existing only as a shell, Konan still feels pangs upon her conscience. Capturing the bijū and inflicting massive chaos and damage upon the Five Nations in the process has never been part of her goals. Revenge for the treatment of Amegakure has never been her goal. If she were another person, she would wash her hands of Pein and try to make her own happiness, and start living for herself for the first time in long, draining years.

But she doesn't. She instead stays rigidly at Pein's side.

No one can fathom why such a, if not compassionate, than at least fair-minded woman holds such loyalty to the ruthless Akatsuki leader. Konan keeps her own counsel.

Konan looks into Nagato's eyes, and knows she can not leave him, not to darkness and not to death, and for a moment feels her heart jolt and ache, before apathy resettles.

So the paper woman stays at Pein's side, silently holding onto the modest dreams of happiness she once had as those dreams, though not forgotten, begin to shrivel and die. And she watches as darkness settles over Amegakure.


End file.
